Measuring Labour's Glasgow triumph
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Independent Minds
Labour's triumph came over as the clear message from Glasgow North East despite the problems of measuring it.
The new constituency was created under boundary changes in 2005 since when its only MP has been Michael Martin who ran as the Speaker - not a party candidate - in the last election with no Labour, Tory or Liberal Democrat runners.
This means no exact swing comparisons can be made.
In fact 4,036 people backed the Socialist Labour Party runner in 2005 - presumably because most of them were searching for Labour's name on the ballot paper.
In yesterday's by-election the SLP got just 47 votes.
Some guidance can be offered by last June's European Parliament voting in the constituency.
Labour then had a 16.3 per cent lead over SNP which has now jumped to 39.4 per cent - a swing of 11.5 per cent.
This does not take the party all the way back to 2005 General Election support but probably close to what it achieved at last year's Glenrothes contest when there was a switch of less than 5 per cent to the nationalists since 2005.
If repeated at the General Election it would give the SNP just one extra Westminster seat - at Ochil and Perthshire South.
But past by-elections suggest there could not be any guarantee of even that.
David Kerr, Glasgow North East's SNP candidate, stood at the December 2000 Falkirk West by-election when he missed a gain by only 705 votes on a huge swing.
In the General Election six months later the party ended up losing a Westminster seat at Galloway and Upper Nithsdale.
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Comments
No worthwhile conclusions can be drawn from such a mindless election result without the unreasonable assumption that every voter in the country must be equally stupid.
So who the hell cares?
Indeed, the only here was apathy, for that, Labour should be ashamed, and should not be smirking, or crowing. Not much danger of that is there ?
The only winner here was apathy. Thought I should correct that omission...
Triumph? 59% of the vote stops sounding anything like a triumph once you take into account the 33% turn-out.
Indeed, even the 33% turn-out's probably an understatement of the full reality. Glasgow North-East is the sort of constitituency where a larger than average number of citizens will have dropped completely beneath the radar by not having registered to vote at all. So it's quite possible that only three out of every ten people theoretically qualified to vote did so. And they're likely to be the old tribal voters, who turn out like they always do.
The real winner, therefore is the "sod-the-lot-of-'em party", and posters in here who argue for expressing total contempt for the whole process by not voting at all can claim a sort of success.
But what does it amount to? Already Mr Murphy's proclaiming this derisory result as an endorsement of Gordon Brown's leadership. The truth is that all they care about is winning. Oh, they'll parrot regrets about the low poll and there'll be calls for the need to "re-engage" - how could they do anything else? - but that fact is that they're in, and they're in just the same how ever small the turn-out.
Not voting just lets the slugs crawl over the decaying matter once again, and the cockroaches infest the cracks just as before.
As last night showed.
In fact, if I was Brown I would find it disturbing that only 33% came out to vote for their pay master.
Perhaps, polling stations in benefits offices would have resulted in more votes ;-)
The best angle on this story could be asking the people who didn't vote (the vast majority of the population in the constituency) why they didn't vote. There were plenty of choices available - far more than we get here. We always have just the 3 main parties to choose from.
Its interesting that the SNP isn't so popular in this area. Why is that? Is it seen as too right-wing in its policies? Another surprise is that the BNP did reasonable well. Is that due to the unionist vote?
So much for Caring Conservatism and the Conservative's pledge to help the poor by "franchising out key public services to social entrepreneurs" a promise that didn't appeal to poor Glaswegians. Or maybe they just don't understand what it means. I'm not sure either.